Designing Your Hybrid Integration Platform

In this unit, you get familiar with the phases "Design your Hybrid Integration Platform" and "Define Integration Best Practices" of the Integration Maturity Level process. These phases support you to run through the change from a non-systematic integration approach to a systematic integration approach in your company.

Following the explanations around these two phases, let's jump right into the Integration Assessment tool. This will help you to get more familiar with its features. We do this by guiding you through exercises. The exercises are as follows:

• Configure the Integration Assessment Tool.
• Create Business Solution and Interface Requests.

As already mentioned in Unit 2, in the second phase of the integration process, your goal should be to design your own future hybrid integration platform. You can achieve this by performing the following steps:

Performing a technology mapping helps you to link functional requirements to the appropriate integration technologies from SAP or other vendors based on their supported functionality.

In the following figure, you can see a technology mapping for process integration. The first two use case patterns (P1, P2) are, depending on the customer context, mapped to the integration technology Enterprise Service Bus ESB from a third-party vendor. The third one is mapped with the analytics platform from SAP.

This step can either be performed via the template-based approach or via the tool-based approach:

1. Template-based: Download the "Technology Mapping Template" and fill it out as follows:
   • Go to the worksheet "Integration Technologies" and maintain the integration technologies in your organization.
   • Go to the worksheet "Integration Use Case Patterns" and do the following:
     • Adapt the list of integration use case patterns in case you’ve modified the SAP delivered ones, like you removed unneeded ones or added custom ones.
     • Select the integration technology that you want to use in your organization for each integration use case pattern.
2. Tool-based approach: Use the Integration Assessment capability within SAP Integration Suite. For more information, see: Review Integration Technology

The definition of certain integration policies makes it easier for integration developers to select the right integration technology of the hybrid integration platform for a given integration requirement.

As mentioned in Unit 2, the SAP Integration Solution Advisory Methodology already provides you with different recommendation degrees for the policies. They cover general recommendations, reasonable alternatives, possible exceptions, and techniques that you would like to avoid in your organization.

Here, you have also the option to choose between the template-based or the tool-based approach:

1. Template-based approach:Download the Integration Policy Template and fill it out for each integration style that has been identified as relevant as part of your enterprise integration strategy:
   
   • "Integration Technology/Service": Select the relevant integration technology for which you want to define an integration policy guideline.
   • "Recommendation Degree": Define the recommendation degree that you would like to assign to the integration technology within your organization.
   • "Description": Describe your integration policy, optionally by referring to the relevant integration use case patterns.
   • "Integration Domains": Assign the integration technology to the relevant integration domains, such as Cloud2OnPremise or Cloud2Cloud.
   • If needed, it is also possible to adjust the integration policy template to your specific needs, for example, adding further columns for additional selection criteria.
2. Tool-based approach: Perform this step using the Integration Assessment Capability within SAP Integration Suite. For more information, see: Analyze and Edit Integration Policies.

In order to successfully complete phase two and define your hybrid integration platform, you now need to assess the interfaces. For integration developers, this step is important because by evaluating an interface of a business application that has to be integrated, they determine the right integration technology. In an implementation project, the typical process, which is performed by an integration developer, looks as follows:

First, the integration developers have to analyze the business scenario. So, they have to determine what is going on (what domain is in place, which applications are covered, and so on). According to that, they have to identify which integration styles and patterns are available (for example, A2A integration, Data Orchestration, or UI Integration). After that, they have to choose the right integration technology.

To run the interface assessment, you have to use the Integration Assessment Capability within the SAP Integration Suite. It provides a questionnaire-based approach that helps integration developers identify the most appropriate integration technology (or combination of integration technologies) for a given integration requirement. Furthermore, the tool provides recommendations for SAP integration technologies. Those recommendations can be customized to take factors from the customer context into account and they are updated by SAP.

There is also the possibility to create your own questionnaires, in which you can include your own recommendations for the integration developers.